Etsy Hacker School Scholarships Support Women In Technology

Today, in conjunction with Hacker School, Etsy is announcing a new scholarship and sponsorship program for women in technology: we’ll be hosting the summer 2012 session of Hacker School in the Etsy headquarters, and we’re providing ten Etsy Hacker Grants of $5,000 each — a total of $50,000 — to women who want to join but need financial support to do so.

Our goal is to bring 20 women to New York to participate, and we hope this will be the first of many steps to encourage more women into engineering at Etsy and across the industry.

While Hacker School itself is free to all students, we know New York City is expensive, and a three-month “hackers’ retreat” might sound enticing but be out of reach for some of the women we want to see attend. So, for 10 female students, we’ll provide a $5,000 needs-based scholarship — a total of $50,000 in grants.

We’ll be thrilled if we get to hire any awesome female engineers from the next batch of Hacker School, but more importantly, we just want to see these women go on to get fun, creative, lucrative jobs in technology — and hopefully tell other women about the great experiences they’ve had.

Twenty is a small number, but it would roughly match the total number of female engineers I’ve hired in the past 17 years. Even a small change can have a large impact, given the severity of the issue.